Color Efex Pro 4: Professional Styling for Color Photos

Color Efex Pro offers several useful workflows that can enhance your digital arsenal, including options that mimic real world tools like neutral density filters and various types of negative and E-6 film stock. Photoshop expert Dan Moughamian explores some of the color styling workflows available in Color Efex Pro 4 Complete, which was released in September 2011.

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The Color Efex Pro 4 user interface has undergone several changes from the previous versions (Figure 1). Most notably, Presets can now be managed and filtered in familiar ways, and the U-Point interface has been updated to be consistent with the version used in other Nik products. However there are other areas that have been tweaked as well, including several brand new filters and a History Browser.

Figure 1 The Color Efex Pro 4 user interface has been fully updated to reflect the newer conventions used in other plugins like Silver Efex Pro 2 and HDR Efex Pro.

The Presets

There are dozens of photo styles within Color Efex Pro 4, several of which are brand new or which have been updated. These include: Detail Extractor, Dark Contrast, Film Efex: Vintage, Film Efex: Modern, Natural Film Borders, Brilliance/Warmth, Film Grain, High Key, Low Key, Paper Toner, Pro Contrast, and a few others.

However, some effects stand out, particularly with respect to subjects in nature (though they don’t all come from the Nature preset group). For this article, we’ll cover four of my favorites: Film Efex Modern (updated), Graduated Fog, Graduated Neutral Density, and the new Detail Extractor. We’ll also take a look at the Filter Combinations feature, the new History Browser, and updates to U-Point. Each of these features helps you to streamline your workflow.